Communications technologies are at the forefront of rapidly changing requirements of the information age. Only a few short years ago, fax machine technologies threatened the traditional way of receiving information in the mail by electronically encoding content and delivering messages over phone lines. This technology revolutionized the way business had been conducted for hundreds of years. Almost as soon as fax machines became ubiquitous, a new technology known as electronic mail or e-mail began to overtake many applications that were previously and exclusively in the domain of fax machines. As e-mail applications grew, still yet other communications technologies evolved such as Instant Messaging services which again threatened older forms of communications. Along with text driven technologies such as e-mail and fax machines, voice communications have also changed from hard wired connections to the ever popular and growing wireless technologies of today.
In order to manage the wide range of communications options that are available to many users, Unified Messaging (UM) applications have begun to appear that provide a service for handling the many communications options available to users. Unified Messaging generally implies the integration of voice, fax, e-mail, and the like allowing a user to access any of these messages, anywhere, anytime, from any terminal of choice. One goal of a Unified Messaging system is to simplify and speed up communication processes to achieve time and cost savings within a corporation or other entity.
One common feature of modern communications systems is that users are generally given various configuration options from different style menus in order to tailor these systems for particular communications preferences. Thus, voice mail, Unified Messaging and other Intelligent Voice Recognition (IVR) applications have user interfaces that are typically menu driven. A menu consists of one or more prompts that can be played to an end-user on the phone, for example. A user makes menu selections by one or more methods such as by using dual tone multi frequency (DTMF) keypad. DTMF navigation techniques can prove cumbersome when many input options exist. Moreover, with increased use of hands-free communication devices, DTMF keypad entry may not be convenient or appropriate.
Recently, automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been employed to a certain degree in UM menu applications to make them easier to use. However, given the large variations in languages, dialects, speech patterns, and individual tendencies, ASR must handle a large number of possible speech scenarios in order to avoid a high percentage of failures. As such, hard coded solutions, such as conventional state machines, become impractical as being unable to accommodate new UM features without burdensome code development and testing.